Brenda McCowan

Brenda McCowan, Ph.D.

Neuroscience and Behavior UnitCore Scientist

ProfessorPopulation Health and ReproductionUC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine

Dr. McCowan’s program focuses on the large matrilineal social groups of rhesus macaques unique to the CNPRC as well as captive and wild macaque groups in both Europe and Asia. One important goal of this program is to employ evolutionary and social network theories for practical applications at the human-animal interface using an interdisciplinary framework comprised of computational biology, genomics, epidemiology, and behavioral ecology.

Publications

Social Networks and Health

Dr. McCowan's research focuses on how the spatial and mathematical relations of networks relate to the content and quality of relationships, and how such variation influences a diversity of health outcomes at the individual and population levels of large social groups of macaques as a translational model for humans.

The CNPRC is an Organized Research Unit of the University of California, Davis and part of the National Primate Research Centers Program. The CNPRC mission is to improve human health and quality of life through support of exceptional nonhuman primate research programs.

LINKS

SUPPORT

Programs of the California National Primate Research Center are supported in part by the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) of the National Institutes of Health through Award Number P51OD011107.